The term affirmative action encompasses a broad range of voluntary and mandated policies and procedures intended to provide equal access to educational and employment opportunities for members of historically excluded groups. Foremost among the bases for historical exclusion have been race, ethnicity, and sex, although consideration is sometimes extended to other groups (e.g., Vietnam veterans, the disabled). Both the concept of affirmative action and its application have undergone a series of transformations and interpretations. These shifts have contributed to considerable ambivalence in levels of public support...

The bell curve provides a foundation for the majority of statistical procedures in sociology. Conceptually it is a histogram, but with such fine distinctions between outcomes that it is a line in the shape of a bell. Beneath this curve are all possible outcomes, with the outcomes on the x-axis and the y-axis describing the proportion or probability for each outcome. The ''tails'' of the curve extend indefinitely. The shape is symmetrical and unimodal, so that the distribution's mean, median, and mode are identical and in the center of the distribution. In the distribution one standard deviation from the mean is 34.13 percent...

Although American community colleges (formerly known as junior colleges) have existed since the late nineteenth century, little sociological attention has been paid to these institutions until recently. The conceptual frameworks that do exist highlight the juxtaposition of the community college's function of expanding access to higher education while also limiting opportunity for many students. Previously enrolling only about 10 percent of all undergraduates, the community college experienced unprecedented growth in the three decades following World War II. Between 1944 and 1947 community college enrollment...

Critical pedagogy challenges both students and teachers to channel their experiences of oppression into educating and empowering marginalized peoples. Critical pedagogues approach education as a process of social, cultural, political, and individual transformation, where social equity can be nourished or social inequity perpetuated. According to critical pedagogues, notions defining rational classification of people into categories that diminish their social affect and importance keep them oppressed. Oppressed peoples thus require not only awareness of inequities they suffer but also an understanding of ways that...

After the Industrial Revolution, the responsibility for educating youth shifted from families to schools in developed nations. Schools are now a major social institution, educating the majority of children and youth in the developed world and functioning as a primary engine of change in developing countries. Sociology of education has sought to understand the central role that schools play in society from a variety of perspectives, with great emphasis on issues pertaining to equality and opportunity. Sociologists have two broad theoretical approaches to studying education's role in society: the functionalist...

Educational attainment is affected by effort and ability which, in turn, are affected by the characteristics of students' families of origin. Students raised by educated parents are more likely to exhibit higher levels of scholastic ability and motivation than those raised by less educated parents. It has been argued (Bourdieu et al. 1977) that children raised in the privileged social strata internalize the values of the dominant culture effortlessly and enjoy an advantage in the educational attainment process. Recent studies show that the main component of cultural capital that affects educational achievement...

Feminist pedagogy begins with the premise that gender and the social inequality it represents in the wider society are often reproduced in the classroom. Existing curricula and classroom practices contain sexist biases and patriarchal assumptions as reflected in the fact that the contributions of women are often absent from textbooks; girls and women are portrayed in stereotypic ways in much of the literature of all disciplines; girls and women are often directed to certain fields of study and are directed away from others; and teaching practices typically favor the learning styles of boys and men. Teachers informed...

Social scientists and educational researchers paid relatively little attention to issues of gender in education until the 1970s, when questions emerged concerning equity in girls' and women's access to education across the world. Increasing female representation in primary and secondary education was cited as an important factor in promoting national economic development, and therefore seen as a vehicle for social change. As the feminist movement increased awareness of widespread gender inequality within US society, researchers began to focus on the educational system as a site of and explanation for women's subordinated status...

The term hidden curriculum refers to the unofficial rules, routines, and structures of schools through which students learn behaviors, values, beliefs, and attitudes. Elements of the hidden curriculum do not appear in schools' written goals, formal lesson plans, or learning objectives although they may reflect culturally dominant social values and ideas about what schools should teach. Of the three major approaches to the hidden curriculum, the functionalist orientation is most concerned with how hidden curricula reproduce unified societies, the conflict perspective focuses on the reproduction of stratified societies...

Traditionally, literacy has meant the ability to read and write. As the cognitive skill requirements of work and daily life have increased, the definition has expanded. In the National Literacy Act of 1991, the US Congress defined literacy as ''an individual's ability to read, write, and speak in English and compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.'' Consistent with this, the National Assessments of Adult Literacy, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, have measured...

The term ''meritocracy'' has three interrelated meanings. First, it refers to the type of social order where rewards are distributed to individuals in accordance with criteria of personal merit. Put differently, it denotes the ''rule of the talented,'' a system of governance wherein the brightest and most conscientious individuals are accurately and efficiently assigned to occupy the most important positions, based on their talent and achievements. Second, the concept pertains to an elite social class, a definite group of people that enjoys high prestige because its select members proved to have merit based...

The USA has a long history of providing racially segregated and unequal public education to its children. Racially separate and unequal public education was not an accident; it was created by public laws and policies enacted and enforced by state governments and local school systems. After a series of Supreme Court decisions eliminated the formal legal foundation for segregation, it was recreated through racially discriminatory practices in federal housing policies, lending for home purchases, employment, wages, and school assignment practices. Desegregation is the process that removes the formal and informal...

The self-fulfilling prophecy is the process by which one's expectations of other people lead those people to behave in ways that confirm those expectations. The term ''self-fulfilling prophecy'' was coined in 1948 by Robert K. Merton, who drew upon W. I. Thomas's well-known dictum: ''if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences'' (Wineberg 1987). The Thomas theorem suggests that the meanings of human actions are not inherent merely in their actions. Rather people attribute meanings to those actions, and the meanings have consequences for future actions. In education, the self-fulfilling prophecy...

Whilst often purporting to be the conveyance of a body of scientific knowledge, in fact ''sex education'' connotes and has always connoted hegemonic discourses relating to politics, morality, sexuality, and social control. As such, it is subject to a multitude of approaches, meanings, and pedagogical strategies and is highly contextual, with localized cultures and understandings making significant differences to both the purposes and practices involved. It is, therefore, often highly politicized. Historically, and in the present, sex education has occupied an uneasy position, straddled between the perceived need to tell...

Status attainment research begun by sociologists in the USA in the 1970s laid the foundation for the study of the transmission of socioeconomic advantage from one generation to the next (also called intergenerational social mobility). Status attainment research seeks to understand how characteristics of an individual's family background (also called socioeconomic origins) relate to his or her educational attainment and occupational status in society. It developed a methodology - usually path analysis and multiple regression techniques with large survey data sets - to investigate the intergenerational...

Tracking is the process of grouping students for instructional purposes based on actual or assumed differences in academic development or interests. In theory, such practices can maximize learning by allowing instruction to be tailored to the needs of each classroom of students. In practice, the quality of instruction often varies dramatically based on the course level such that low track students receive few learning opportunities while high track students are exposed to a rich and rigorous curriculum. When group placements are related to ascribed characteristics such as social class or ethnicity...